Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls(8)

Because Lee likes to eat stir-fry, we eat it, too. She likes to balance baby corns like Jenga blocks, so I do this, too. When she begins writing songs, Misty and I write some, too. Lee’s songs are about aching for and missing random stuff. The past, her innocence, a bag of jelly beans, camp. She strums an acoustic guitar pressed against her bare stomach, whisper-humming the words with her eyes squeezed closed.

Misty and I write about Jewish boys becoming men, the echo range of seashells, a secret place in the sky. We write about blonde girls and their supreme blonde beauty and about how nobody will ever love us because we are neither blonde nor beautiful (When I see you, my heart melts down Down so far I sink to the ground But when I see you with that dumb blonde / I scream to myself, What have I done wrong?). Misty is white, with a real kid-like body, and we both suffer from freckles. We sing about this until our throats crack like radio static. We call our two-person act Kotton Kandy. We rename each other Sparkle (Misty) and Shimmer (me), promising to get out of Boca one day, pay for matching boob jobs, and forget who it was we were.

Lee listens to each one of our songs, nodding her head. She records us on a video camera with her hand balanced beneath a padded strap. She tells us we have potential. We believe her so much we keep writing, rehearsing, harmonizing, performing outside her bedroom.

You’ve got to really feel the music, she says. Feel it like you’re inside of it.

Misty and I take turns calling the 800 number for The Box music video channel, punching in serial numbers to request Britney, Christina, Mandy, Jessica. We suck on Warheads and wait for our girls to appear, carefully learning their hair flips and choreographies, the shapes and characteristics of their belly buttons.

On her boom box, Lee blasts a song about going down on a man in a theater.

This is Alanis Morissette, she says. Take notes on this attitude. Take notes on the feeling.

Later, when I ask my mother what it means to go down on someone in a theater, she tells me it’s a way that two people share popcorn. Everybody does it.

Back home, on my Uncle Whack’s black box of cable, I’ve found something I quite like. On channels 590–595, naked people fuck each other. They say this word all the time on the channels. They say Fuck my face, and I’m going to fuck you stupid till your brain shoots out of your ears, and Get over here, my little fucktoy. Once, after school, Misty and I took turns saying the word—fuck—the first time for us both while we hung from the school monkey bars. We whispered it at first, repeated it back and forth until we built some momentum, and after a minute or two we were screaming it—FUCK!—until we laughed so hard it felt like ghosts were crying out of our faces.

When I’m alone, though, I can’t stop thinking about It, that burn that makes me want to turn the television off but also keep it running forever. I discovered It around the time of Jet’s letters, and then again, recently, in the bathtub, the showerhead turned all the way to level three. It is all I can think about lately; I can’t seem to stop. It’s like a fist grabs hold of my brain, squeezing it, until my own thoughts pop out and suddenly I’ve got somebody else’s crazy thoughts. I like to go until it hurts.

I tell Misty none of this. It only happens alone. But when I get to folding my pillows in half and straddling them at night, sometimes I hear the pike of my Grandma Rose’s voice. The first time I tried to swat a mosquito from my arm, she pinched me by the chin, screaming That could be your grandfather! Every fly is somebody dead and sacred. Every cockroach is watching. I wonder if my ancestors know about the showerhead, the hairbrush, the pencil, the pillow lumps, the candlestick, the toothbrush; if they’re screaming Ai yah! from a spider web somewhere beneath my bathroom sink.

Lee goes to a special art school and hangs out with other former ballerinas. The metallic spandex and blossoms of tulle are long gone, only present in the framed photographs her mother hangs on the wall in a perfect, chronological row. Some of Lee’s friends have short hair, shaved like a boy’s, and Misty and I have never seen any grown girl (who’s not a mom) with this kind of hair before, and we laugh about it, ask Lee why her friends do it. Why the baggy pants? Why this look? Why don’t you all wear glitter on your eyes like high schoolers are allowed to do? You’re supposed to look sexy, we say. You’re supposed to wear tight, womanly things—things that hug you in all of your womanly places.

Misty is still a ballerina. I show up to her classes in East Boca and wait behind the glass. I attend every recital and Nutcracker performance because it’s nice to support my friend, but it’s even nicer to watch her teacher, Jaqueline, kick-kick her legs in a leotard. I can see every dent of her body under that skin-like fabric. I can even see her breathing.

Whenever Lee brings her friends over, Misty and I sled down the staircase on linen couch cushions. We usually get snagged somewhere in the middle and tumble the rest of the way down. Lee takes our cushions under her armpits and leads us back up to Misty’s room. She looks sad in the doorway the way adults often do, and she says, Can you please just leave us alone tonight? Can you guys just listen to Hanson or take your quizzes or write your songs? Anything?

Misty and I love the Hanson brothers. We love their high-pitched voices, their shoulder-length golden hair. I wonder what kind of conditioner they use, I say. My hair is cut like the top of a mushroom so that it fits neatly beneath my riding helmet, and because I refused to brush my hair—it was not my choice. I think these boys look more womanly than me.